As part of a recruiting drive I have over the past couple of weeks contacted people with resumes posted on CareerBuilder. I usually contact them with an iMessage or SMS first to see, whether they are willing to take my call.
About a week ago I noticed that my iMessage capability had gone away or at least had become extremely intermittent. Curiously, I was able to send SMSs from my Mac without issues, because they were relayed through my iPhone. In fact, the way I noticed the problem was that people with whom I had been accustomed to exchange iMessages suddenly refused those and only accepted SMSs. I knew that they hadn’t ditched their iPhones for Android devices. AppleCare reps made me jump through all sorts of hoops like logging out of iCloud in Messages and logging back in, rebooting, rebooting in Safe Mode, resetting the SMC, resetting NVRAM, reinstalling the OS from the recovery partition. The last thing seemed to have fixed things. For a couple of days.
After about the fourth call I was finally put in touch with a senior advisor who had me collect logs, which took about an hour or so. A couple of business days later, today, I learned from that senior advisor that Engineering, which is where my logs had been sent, had found that iMessage capability had been blocked because of spam complaints. Supposedly, that block had been lifted. Not entirely, actually. I am again now holding for and advisor.
It would seem to me that if you place your resume on CareerBuilder and if that resume has your phone number in it, you give whoever gets access to that resume through legitimate means an implicit permission to call or message you. If you don’t want to be called, you remove your resume from where you posted it. If that’s important to you, you keep track of where you posted it.
One could derive a recipe for an iMessage DOS attack from this. Just get a sufficiently large number (don’t know what the threshold is) iMessage participants to file a spam complaint on an iMessage ID or phone number.
About a week ago I noticed that my iMessage capability had gone away or at least had become extremely intermittent. Curiously, I was able to send SMSs from my Mac without issues, because they were relayed through my iPhone. In fact, the way I noticed the problem was that people with whom I had been accustomed to exchange iMessages suddenly refused those and only accepted SMSs. I knew that they hadn’t ditched their iPhones for Android devices. AppleCare reps made me jump through all sorts of hoops like logging out of iCloud in Messages and logging back in, rebooting, rebooting in Safe Mode, resetting the SMC, resetting NVRAM, reinstalling the OS from the recovery partition. The last thing seemed to have fixed things. For a couple of days.
After about the fourth call I was finally put in touch with a senior advisor who had me collect logs, which took about an hour or so. A couple of business days later, today, I learned from that senior advisor that Engineering, which is where my logs had been sent, had found that iMessage capability had been blocked because of spam complaints. Supposedly, that block had been lifted. Not entirely, actually. I am again now holding for and advisor.
It would seem to me that if you place your resume on CareerBuilder and if that resume has your phone number in it, you give whoever gets access to that resume through legitimate means an implicit permission to call or message you. If you don’t want to be called, you remove your resume from where you posted it. If that’s important to you, you keep track of where you posted it.
One could derive a recipe for an iMessage DOS attack from this. Just get a sufficiently large number (don’t know what the threshold is) iMessage participants to file a spam complaint on an iMessage ID or phone number.